RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
True. But really, being proud that you reached agriculture and tribal-level development isn't very impressive. Only a few thousand years behind the curve on metalworking! One wonders whether formerly-Aztec Mexicans or Mayans are snooty about being lumped in with mere nomadic 'native Americans' who never got that into astronomy or stone-working.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Low performers are irrelevant, it's high performers that are dangerous. Who is more dangerous as a grudgebearer - Joshua VerbalIQbaum or Mgubu the Witless? Likewise it's not unreasonable for Chang, Zheng and much of the Maths Olympiad phenotype to hold a grudge for their treatment in the 19th and early 20th century. You can always ignore Mgubu, he has no armoured brigades or advanced rhetoric.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
I think back in the day it was so manifestly obvious that swearing an oath meant you had to stand by it they never encoded such a section. In any event she could say 'i take this obligation freely and sincerely' in her usual overtly insincere and obnoxious manner. Root problem isn't solved. In the 1930s a fair few Wehrmacht officers felt restricted from plotting against Hitler because they swore an oath to him. It was not on! People would go around saying 'my word is my bond'.
In any event she did sign the paper so she formally ticked the box. Oaths are just box-ticking these days, no more meaningful than terms and conditions for free software, no more meaningful than the King's Champion who used to ride up, throw down a gauntlet and challenge anyone who disputed the new monarch's right to rule in single combat. He's still there of course, just holds a standard now.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
I've seen enough of ao3, what great sin have we committed? Would a just deity unleash ao4 on the world?
More seriously though, it's bad for society if people aren't in stable, happy relationships. What is shame for? Why do we have it? To bully people into doing things that are pro-social. There's a reason why fat people are shamed and it's not just because of cruelty for cruelty's sake, there's value in it as well.
Some people just aren't relationship material and have qualities in other domains. Montgomery would doubtless be bullied for rizzing up the baddies with how he'd lay out his tanks in future wars.
Nixon told girls about his autistic alt-history scenarios where the Persians conquered the Greeks and this impeded his love life somewhat.
But society was structured in such a way that these men didn't end up loners because they were weird or gave women the ick, they married and had kids. What are we doing if the most erudite and civilized men are devoting their lives to B2B SAAS and not having kids?
Why doesn't Ted Cruz know the population of Iran? And what is with him generally? Or the whole upper echelons of the US govt?
I reference a recent Tucker Carlson interview with Cruz, where it turns out he didn't know said population (and has since responded with an AI meme image of Tucker asking Luke the population of the Death Star).
Turns out that the population of Iran is 92 million, I thought it was around 80. 80 would be a fairly reasonable answer. Even Yemen is surprisingly populous, around 41 million. Fun game to try - estimate the population of various countries in these areas.
I thought Ted Cruz was supposed to be super-smart, wouldn't it be natural to read up on Iran? He is on the Subcommittee on Near East, South Asia, Central Asia, and Counterterrorism. It's also relevant to US strategic choices and his particular love of Israel. Knowing about the subpopulations and relative size of the Azeris, Kurds and similar would be relevant to regime change, which is his professed goal:
Senator Ted Cruz has explicitly stated that he wants regime change in Iran. He said on Fox News, “I think it is very much in the interest of America to see regime change,” and that there is “no redeeming the ayatollah” regime. Cruz has called for collapsing the Iranian regime, comparing it to the Cold War-era strategy used against the Soviet Union, and has criticized the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal, pushing for stronger actions against Iran.
To his credit he does know that Iran is Persian and predominantly Shia. And maybe being on a bunch of other subcommittees means he has to divide up his time and energy in all these different areas. But it's not like Tucker is asking really sophisticated questions about the position and integration of Azeri elites in the Tehran power structure. That really should be dealt with by an expert diplomat. But senators are supposed to be making strategic decisions, one has to have some base of knowledge to decide upon different courses of action.
Cruz also thinks that the Bible requires Christians to support the nation of Israel, which is somewhat non-mainstream in theology: "Where does my support for Israel come from, number 1 we're biblically commanded to support Israel". Tucker tries to ask 'do you mean the government of Israel' and Cruz says the nation of Israel, as if to say it's common-sense that the nation of Israel as referred to in the Bible is the same as the state of Israel today. It seems like he's purposely conflating the dual meanings of nation as ethnic group and nation as state, which is a stupid part of English.
Also Cruz said to Tucker "I came into Congress 13 years ago with the stated intention of being the leading defender of Israel in the United States”. How would this help in the context of a hostile interview, does he think that's a helpful thing to say? I can only imagine that Cruz thinks this is a winning issue, he wants to play hard rather than go down the wishy-washy 'Judeo-Christian' values route. Is declaring your devotion to a foreign country really that popular in America?
Trump also posted this somewhat ominous diatribe from Mike Huckabee (pastor and ambassador to Israel) praising Trump's divine prominence, his position similar to 'Truman in 1945' and how he has to listen to god and the angels only... https://x.com/Mondoweiss/status/1934999328583713096/photo/1
This episode reminds me of how George W Bush apparently didn't know of the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam until after deciding to invade, he brought up Gog and Magog when trying to persuade Chirac to join the war. Maybe that's false, some have disputed it. Or how Trump apparently won't read any long extracts of text and demands pictures. Maybe that's also false, lots of stories have been made about Trump policy. It's known that Biden didn't know whether people were alive or dead or what was happening much of the time. Large swathes of the Democrats can't tell the difference between men and women.
Here's another one I just found from another US congressman: https://x.com/VoteRandyFine/status/1839686465820766542
There is a reason the first time I shook @netanyahu‘s hand, I did not wash it until I could touch the heads of my children.
That's just weird!
There are serious structural problems with how America selects its politicians if this is the calibre of talent that's drawn into positions of great power. At the risk of sounding like an edgy atheist fighting a war everyone's tired of and moved on from years ago, surely theology should have no place in grand strategy. It's normal to have colourful characters in politics, some corruption, some old people who don't know what's going on, a certain level of lobbying. But this seems to be on a qualitatively different level, with serious results.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
I thought bartender or stand-up was being interpreted as 'poor'. Like how sometimes people say self-employed when they mean unemployed. Or how women are plus-size, curvy, big-boned rather than fat.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
The US can clearly do fine with a modest number of West Africans dragging it down. But if you want first-world performance... If you want safe, efficient, orderly public transport... If you want a lower burden of progressive taxation and affirmative action... If you want crime at civilized, first world levels...
Then you need to address the problem at the root cause. If you let them have political power they'll cause all kinds of problems, they'll West Africanize the country to a lesser or greater extent based on their number, admixture and so on. Bloated and corrupt government is just one and not even the worst problem necessarily.
Consider a thought experiment - what if all the politicians and powerful officials in America had to be black? Give it 20 years for the effects to settle. What do you expect the outcome would be in terms of performance? Would it look more like a high performance country (Japan, Switzerland) or a low performance country like South Africa? Naturally the US has plenty of capable demographics to squander so the decline wouldn't be as severe as South Africa, whose murder rate is actually comparable to the death toll in the Russia-Ukraine war. Nevertheless, there are no white poor performance countries and no black high performance countries. Even on a city level one can observe that having politics dominated by blacks is not a recipe for good outcomes: Detroit.
Now consider the reverse. All the politicians and powerful officials in America have to be non-black. Give it 20 years. Would the outcome be better than the alternate? Is the US really losing much by banning them from office? All that would happen is some rioting, which can be quickly and easily put down with a little effort. West Africans are notoriously bad at fighting, disorganized and inaccurate marksmen. Of course it's a totally moot point since as bad as West Africans are at fighting, US whites are even less willing to force the issue.
It reminds me of the sage, soft-speaking Islamic cleric speaking with profound meaning "democracy means government by the people, of the people, for the people... but the people are retarded"
It's the same with economics. It's known how to do economics to increase prosperity. You need to do capital deepening and R&D. The more the better. It's a little more complicated than that but only a little!
Capital deepening and R&D isn't even a topic of discussion in politics, outside of maybe Singapore, China or the UAE. Instead it's 'how much money can we take from productive people and give to old people?' Or 'how can we make things more expensive, can it take longer to build out any capital?' Could we make irritating popups appear on all the world's websites? Let's cap the number of doctors we train for zero rational reason, while lawyers proliferate beyond all control. How about invading and conquering an incredibly low-value, poor country and spending huge amounts on it? How about demolishing our industrial base and offshoring it? How about making medicine 'free' (funded by taxes)?
'Let's build some infrastructure at ludicrously uncompetitive prices' is at least capital deepening but it's not very good.
The closest they come to R&D is more spending on education which is 90% unrelated to capital deepening or R&D, it's Ipads or laptops in schools or making low value university degrees cheaper (funded by taxes) - or just administrative bloat.
I think the ceasefire is fake, like the Russia-Ukraine ceasefires. Both sides are just manoeuvring to look like they want peace when they really want victory. They'll say 'oh they broke the ceasefire' and continue on. Israel has broken no small number of ceasefires throughout the years and the Iranians do similar things with their proxies.
Trump's powers are not that great. He can produce drama and break things but he cannot mend or create to any significant extent. He can rugpull Ukraine for instance but he cannot actually achieve peace with honour like he promised. He can rugpull the NASDAQ with tariffs but he cannot actually reorder the world economic system to spur sustained manufacturing growth in America per his goals, let alone abolish the income tax per his musings. Note that both of these are very difficult tasks!
The prospects of him using diplomacy effectively on Iran of all countries is very slim. Firstly, Trump does not know how to do diplomacy in general. Secondly, his entire Iran policy consists of being as untrustworthy as possible, reneging on treaties, issuing ultimatums and bombing the country.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
if the position is that all US interests are subordinate to Israeli interests
Israel doesn't own the US government but they have enormous influence especially in foreign policy and anything pertaining to Israel. Occasionally the US tries to do something that actually prioritizes American interests over Israel's, the Israel lobby usually nixes this in the end: the Iran deal for instance. Now the US does have huge leverage over Israel in terms of capabilities. Merely shutting off aid would be catastrophic for their military, who relies on US provided weapons, satellites, communications and USAF for air defence. I've said before that the US could annihilate Israel at will with sanctions alone, the state would quickly disintegrate.
But in terms of mental, political, lobbying power, Israel enjoys a huge advantage. The warrior can easily demolish a succubus in battle but it's irrelevant if she has her charm spell running.
I'm not dogmatic on whether it's arm-twisting or owning hearts and minds, there's a mix of both going on. Nor can I give you a date where it suddenly happened, it's not a switch that was flipped on but a gradual process peaking around the 2000s.
But something, surely, has to be off when you've got big figures like Ted Cruz going on interviews about how the Bible says God will bless those who bless Israel, curse those who curse Israel, how he got into politics aiming to be the biggest defender of Israel. Some of this is Adelson money and other Israel lobby cash/threats, some of it is weird Christianity, nevertheless it's unusual and indicates powerful influence.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
Genetics is just really complicated. It is not at all simple like the 'blue eye gene recessive, brown eye gene dominant' charts you might have studied in school. It is not designed to be comprehensible, it's a giant mess that somehow works most of the time.
Why don't everyone's kids look like models? Why are some people born retarded goblin-creatures with gruesome, deformed faces? Why are people dying of old age? Because we don't have a good understanding of genetics, because it's just very difficult. Nobody even knows what 98% of the genome does, it was thought to be 'junk'. We know about as much about genetics as we know about the high-level structure of the universe, nothing of any significance. There too, 95% is 'dark'.
Not to mention that measuring intelligence is complicated, whether it's people or AI. Intelligence is a vibe, a fuzzy, qualitative thing. You can tell the difference between smart and dumb, that is immediately obvious. But quantifying it is very hard.
It is completely understandable for the genetic basis of intelligence to be very murky and unclear. Meanwhile, heritability is possibly the oldest branch of biology. Animals were being bred millennia ago, we know it works, few things have a stronger basis in fact.
I think political solutions can encourage personal/political virtue. Imagine a really intense anti-corruption campaign, where high ranking people were actually given long prison sentences or executed for corruption? Wouldn't that work on the simple, clear level of 'cant commit crime if dead'? China has become less corrupt since the mid 2000s after pursuing this approach.
How does a culture become virtuous in the first place if not severe punishment crushing the bad elements? If the bottom-up anti-corruption from virtue angle isn't working, then one may as well try top-down. In the US this kind of approach is complicated because there are certain groups that are innately clannish and corrupt or so inclined in that direction that it's nigh-impossible to correct. I don't know why anyone expects West Africans to perform well in anything. You can look at West Africans in West Africa and uniformly it's a mess, regardless of history or laws (Liberia stands out here). You can look at West Africans in Haiti - standard West African demographics and outcomes but in the Western Hemisphere instead. And you can look at West Africans with a non-trivial amount of white admixture in the US, plus a constant inflow of white money - much less of a mess but still a mess. Certain parts of Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, even areas of Washington DC... these are not places one wants to be!
If you don't want a bloated, grossly inefficient, corrupt government, don't let them have any political power.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
The cost of obesity is enormously high economically, medically and aesthetically. Investing in shaming might well pay great dividends. Japan has quite strong shaming of the fat and the country is very thin. Diet also plays a part in this but the shaming likely has a strong effect.
A median porn video teaches a teenage male that of course a woman will be enflamed with desire as soon as you touch her, enthusiastically give you oral sex for a while, then be ready to get fucked however hard you want to fuck her, then happily switch to anal and finally let you cum on her face. Communication about consent, boundaries, or birth control?
Surely people are aware that there's a difference between reality and fantasy? Movies teach me that with the power of friendship and snarky quips I can overthrow giant conspiracies and evil empires. But I don't try that IRL because the evil empire is actually very strong.
I guess there are a bunch of retarded people like the guys who openly masturbate to lingerie adverts on the street or try to rape girls in the park who don't appreciate this fine point. But they're not going to get the message 'don't be creepy and rapey' since they're already locked in on the creepy, rapey lifestyle. 'Why would I not rape when I can, how am I supposed to fuck' they might say and be right, since surely nobody consents to sex with ugly, poor, retarded men. The answer here is using force, not education.
Also, anything teachers or the state try to do will be extremely uncool and cringe. It'll be just like the 'informed consent, no means no' training that nearly every institution has but worse. Can you even imagine how groan-inducingly awful official state-sponsored pornography will be? How woke and diverse and uncool and stilted the dialogue is?
All this would do is teach the more autistic men insanely uncharismatic bedroom talk and make them more nervous. Anyone who wants to actually get off will go to real porn, or hentai, or impossible AI girls. I think it would actually make girls more pressured too, they don't want to be an uncool, frigid, lame bitch like that girl in Safe and Respectful Physical Connection Part 4, do they?
A better solution would be punitively obliterating Pornhub and co with massive fines and lawsuits so they stop profiting off people trafficking and child rape.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
Anyone else reading that excerpt and thinking 'Based'? Wouldn't it be excellent to carve out a new artificial world, make better animals and plants according to one's wishes? Live as long as one likes without regard for age?
Not the specifics of perfectly cleaning the world, that could take many angles. One might make a jungle of talking animals, or an endless lived-in leafy suburbia or a Willy Wonka wonderland or all of those things simulated within a ball of computronium. But isn't that the logical endpoint of ever increasing mastery and control of the world? What's the alternative, stasis?
I can sense that many people don't like this vision but isn't this what we're doing, irregardless of objections? Unless you think 'no people mustn't live forever' or 'we mustn't have children' or 'technological advancement must stop' then you endorse indefinite growth in numbers and in power of worldshaping and knowledge ("All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control"), so eventually something like this will happen.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
less than 1% of Israel's GDP
Forget GDP, GDP is just a number. You can't just go out and buy large numbers of artillery shells, JDAMs, advanced missile defence, spare parts. It's not a liquid market, buying more can just make the price go up. Few countries make these things. Israel can't produce munitions at scale because they're a small country, they don't even have a domestic steel industry. They rely on the US for this because America is actually large and has huge stockpiles that are reliably used to replenish the Israeli arsenal. Otherwise they'd just run out of munitions or Israel would have to wait ages to restock, inhibiting their military capacity.
Furthermore, military aid always roars up whenever Israel actually needs it, it went up to about $22 billion in the year after October 7th. See here: https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2024/USspendingIsrael
Technically speaking, the there is a law against America giving any military aid to nuclear powers who haven't signed the non-proliferation treaty like Israel but they just pretend it's fine.
Was this last bit about the USAF some sort of typo?
No, the USAF and RAF literally, directly, provide air defence for Israel directly. US F-16s shot down Iranian missiles attacking Israel. Plus US warships nearby fire their expensive ABMs to defend Israel.
the US has never invested ground forces in taking out any military group directly opposing Israel
Saddam's Iraq was an anti-Israel force. Israel bombed their nuclear reactor in the 80s. In the Gulf War Iraq Scudded Israel. In 2003, the US invaded Iraq, in large part due to false intelligence about WMDs which the Israelis contributed. Plus a bunch of US policymakers talked about how the real reasoning was that Iraq was a threat to Israel. See my comment here: https://www.themotte.org/post/765/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/162796?context=8#context
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
I dislike how he brushes over 'lab leaks'. That should've been the real story, it's more important than all other factors and especially more important than feeling sad about the death toll.
Nothing was learnt from COVID. Literally nothing, gain of function research is still continuing. Everyone knows that gain of function research caused this disaster. But nobody can be bothered to do anything about it, Trump has frozen federal funding into gain of function. A funding freeze is not remotely proportionate for the megadeath machine.
Speaking anonymously, an HHS source revealed that one of the researchers poked a hole in the other's protective equipment during a vicious 'lovers' spat'.
Dr Connie Schmaljohn, the lab's director, was also placed on administrative leave after she allegedly failed to report the incident to other officials.
In a previous incident in May 2018, anthrax may have been accidentally released from the boiler room at one of the labs in Fort Detrick, Maryland, and into a nearby river where people were planting lilypads. No illnesses were reported as a result of the potential release.
This is a BSL-4 lab by the way, America's top people. Wuhan was BSL-3. These doctors have been behaving like clowns with the most dangerous technology on the planet. There's no sign of any professionalism, considering the danger of their work. The acceptable number of lab leaks is zero, it's the same as the acceptable number of accidental nuclear strikes. The AI community seems to care more about bioweapon risk, that's a big part of the whole AI safety rhetoric. But why should anyone care about whether AIs can synthesize bioweapons when the experts are already doing it so carelessly?
This stuff should be done out on South Georgia island near the south pole, or somewhere incredibly remote with a huge mandatory quarantine period, if and only if it's absolutely necessary. Otherwise, anyone who tries to do gain of function, especially with humanized mice like they were doing for COVID (like Daszak boasted about in his tweets) should be treated like Osama Bin Laden, with special forces coming in to shoot them on sight.
The right of scientists to publish cool papers and do interesting research in convenient locations does not come above the right to life, freedom and property for tens, hundreds of millions.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
He has a space program, I don't believe it's beyond his power to get someone to manage dinner parties easily, or at least more easily than a massive 80 million dollar wedding. If anyone is elite human capital, it's bezos. He can learn!
Nobody goes that far as a matter of convenience. Bezos is not marrying out of convenience, there must be some deeper reason.
While the conflict is unsightly, the economic policy of 'lets continuously cut taxes and raise spending' is Zimbabwe-tier. America cannot afford to treat the rest of the world like retarded clowns forever, no matter how stupid and foolish other countries are. They're not going to keep buying these little bits of paper at a high price. Bond rates have been and will continue to rise.
A trillion dollars borrowed every 180 days? Inflation will inevitably spike and then interest rates will need to be raised, with serious consequences for refinancing. US is already at 124% debt to GDP, there's not much more room to borrow.
There are lots of people on the MAGA-right who don't seem to care about this at all, just the political impossibility of cutting spending. Being bankrupt isn't great politically either. Inflationary spirals aren't great either. Schizo tariff wars with the rest of the world... aren't great either. Trump and some of his key advisors have basically no concept of what it means to run the economy, they are not economically literate. It's like Soviet politburo members in the 1980s who had no idea how the Soviet economy actually ran, the complex dual-currency system that existed to prevent inflation. They had no concept of inflation. The Biden administration was little better, they did much the same thing. But one fundamentally can't expect loyalty from others if one flails around breaking things constantly in a position of power.
I think they could've made a better Snow White film than the original, it's just that they didn't want to. They wanted to make a bad film and did so.
Mastery isn't the problem, it's bad people using great resources to achieve bad goals. Now I see it, there's a pleasing symmetry in our tags "Just build nuclear plants" and "nuclear levels of sour" and what we're saying.
However I do agree that there are serious risks with progress and power concentration, it will probably end in tears for the vast majority for us for the same fundamental reason, bad people wanting bad things.
I don't see a collapse pathway though, only greater acceleration. Technology forms society. Writing and agriculture enabled settled states, steam engines enabled modern society. Powerful AI will enable transhuman or posthuman society. Maybe that does look more like an oligarchy where a few enjoy limitless technological power and can suppress everyone else. It may well be bad for those who aren't a chosen few or a singular one. Nevertheless I expect that it'd be much more highly developed than modern civilization in technological sophistication and scale.
Even if there's a full nuclear exchange induced by destabilizing technology, would the survivors really give up on securing more wealth, more power, more security through technological superiority? I believe they'd think 'damn, we should've struck first' or 'this time let's hide our schemes more effectively' or 'at least we've got the most remaining resources, we can try again'. They'd still know all the things we'd know, they'd be back at it again sooner or later, probably sooner and with a more ferocious sense of determination. A full nuclear exchange isn't certain either, it's hard to foresee what happens. I agree that there will be ever-greater instability and disruptions but that's just part of the transition from one kind of society to the next. The general trend is that even occasional setbacks (using rooted in social decline) are overcome - the Bronze Age Collapse, the fall of Rome and the Black Death only temporarily inhibited a larger trend of acceleration. Ideally acceleration should be channelled in a more pro-social way than it is but it seems an irresistible trend. Only if this time is different should we expect it to fail.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
28d ago
Despite every war being started by the Arabs
Fake history. The Six-Day War was started by Israel and they were the aggressor in Suez.
More recently, (Sharon) acted with generosity by withdrawing from Gaza in 05.
He did that because he concluded it wasn't demographically practical to settle, demolish Palestinian houses and do the standard divide-and-conquer tactics in Gaza. Sharon was not a generous man in any reasonable sense. His military career included war crimes, he founded Unit 101 and is responsible for the Qibya Massacre amongst other things.
Ariel Sharon wrote in his diary that "Qibya was to be an example for everyone," and that he ordered "maximal killing and damage to property". Post-operational reports speak of breaking into houses and clearing them with grenades and shooting.
JCPoA (Iran Nuclear deal) was signed
The US reneged on this when Trump got into office, Trump being heavily backed by Israeli lobbyists who got what they were paying for.
Imagine if your daughter got raped and murdered. Then your friend says "she had it coming".
It really isn't this simple. The Israelis have a habit of shooting Palestinian children in the back, along with unarmed protestors. There's a lot of bad blood on both sides. The Arabs are not nice people either. Wars are unpleasant, borders are formed by bloodshed. However, it is inappropriate and ahistorical to valorize Israel as though they're pure good facing pure evil.
Where is the outrage over all the Palestinians who get sodomized or tortured in Israeli prisons? Israeli parliamentarians have said, on camera, 'oh they had it coming, they're Hamas, we can do anything we like!' The Muslim world are the ones who get upset about this, along with people who read various UN or Human rights reports on the subject. The 'free palestine' leftists are doing the same thing as you, seeing both real and imagined evils of one party, siding with the other and then ignoring their own flaws. This kind of skewed perspective eventually creates support for unsound policies, rousing excessive passions about other people's wars.
If Iran's nuclearization is inevitable
They've been six months away from nukes for 30 years now, according to Israeli intelligence. How is this line of argument evergreen?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Yeah, the Aztecs did have something substantial. Pretty sure the Indigenous know they lost a war (they want recognition of massacres on the frontier after all) but want to relitigate it. There's a website that shows you what was happening (or at least what they managed/chose to record) and it was totally one-sided: https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/map.php
With the Native Americans in the US, they managed to somehow eke out 2:1 or 3:1 native deaths for each white death. In Australia it was 20:1, maybe as high as 60:1.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
I discussed it with a judge doing more advanced judgey things (abstract legal analysis of a case judgement as if presenting a paper at a conference) and he thought Sonnet 3.6 was a pretty decent law student, so presumably Opus 4 or indeed o3 would be lots better.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
I refuse to believe that the human suffering cost of being fat-shamed, over and above just being unnecessarily ugly and physically weak, is worse than millions and millions of deaths.
I don't see why people are taking issue with this. Why should suffering and pain be cognitively complex?
Emotional heartbreak or intellectual suffering may be intellectually demanding but that's not really worse than pain. If you thrash a severely, extremely mentally retarded person then he may very well cry out and try to evade you, his suffering isn't obviously diminished by his stupidity. I might well choose intellectual pain over physical pain if given the option.
The real issue is concluding that because animals are suffering due to human policies there's a systematic need to change our behaviour. There isn't. Animals are not people by definition. There's no need to worry about them.
Saying 'oh well bees are only worth 0.0002 human suffering points not 0.02 or 0.07' is a foolish defence. There's a lot of bees around. If you multiply it out then we'd still need to put great effort into satisfying their desires, likewise with other insects. There are lots of ants and rats and whatever else, ludicrous numbers of them. Put the baseline animal moral weighting at 0 and there's no problem, regardless of how they suffer. Furthermore, it might be discovered that, by scanning the brain of the bee or some other animals, that these animals actually feel deeper pain and more profound suffering than we do. Who cares even if that were so? Does some weird mole or marmot deserve welfare because it has an overdeveloped sense of suffering?
There's no need to go out of our way to harm animals but they shouldn't be considered in this way. Instead of weighted benevolence, there should be a focus on reciprocity. If the bear or elephant is nice to people and helps out, then be nice to the elephant or bear. If the killer whale tries to sink human ships, kill it. The size of their brains or their ability to feel pain shouldn't relate to how they're treated. A bee is worth more than a pitbull in my book.
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